Caelestis Indomitus

Starting Occupations

Select one of the starting occupations for your 1st-level character. This represents the training and life experience the character has had prior to the start of the campaign. A hero may hold other jobs as their career unfolds, but the benefits of a starting occupation are only applied once, at the time of character creation.

Most starting occupations have a prerequisite that the character must meet to qualify for the occupation. Each occupation provides a number of additional permanent class skills that you can select from a list of choices. Once selected, a permanent class skill is always considered to be a class skill for your character. If the skill you select is already a class skill for the character, you gain a one-time competence bonus for that skill.

Some starting occupations provide a Reputation bonus or a bonus feat (in addition to the two feats a 1st level character already receives). Finally, a starting occupation increases the character’s Wealth bonus.

List of Starting Occupations:

Adventurers include professional daredevils, big-game hunters, relic hunters, explorers, extreme sports enthusiasts. field scientists, thrill seekers, and others called to face danger for a variety of reasons.

This starting occupation covers artist of all type who fan their creative spark into a career. Illustrators, copywriters, cartoonists, graphic artists, novelists, magazine columnists, actors, sculptors, game designers, musicians, screenwriters, photographers, and web designers all all under this occupation.

Athletes include amateur athletes of Olympic quality and professional athletes of all types, including gymnasts, weight trainers, wrestlers, boxers, martial artists, swimmers, skaters, and those who engage in any type of competitive sport.

A celebrity is anyone who, for whatever reason, has been thrust into the spotlight of the public eye. Everyone, it is said, eventually gains his or her 15 minutes of fame. The celebrity stretches those 15 minutes into a career. Actors, entertainers of all types, newscasters, radio and television personalities, and more fall under this starting occupation.

Colonists are wayfaring pioneers who set the foundations of new societies on far-flung continents, planets, or moons. To survive in their new surroundings, they learn to live off the land and defend themselves against indigenous predatory life forms and hostile forces of nature.

Dilettantes usually get their wealth from family holdings and trust funds. The typical dilettante has no job, few responsibilities, and at least one driving passion that occupies their day. That passion might be a charity or philanthropic foundation, an ideal or cause worth fighting for, or a lust for living a fun and carefree existence.

Drifters are aimless wanderers and world wise jacks-of-all-trades who move between cities or start systems, working odd jobs until boredom or fate leads them elsewhere. Along the way, they learn strange customs and pick up interesting and diverse skills.

Entrepreneurs have an obsession with being their own boss. They are confident in their abilities and understand the risks and rewards of the market. These small to large business owners have a knack for putting together business plans, gathering resources, and getting a new venture off the ground.

Heirs are the elite sons and daughters of powerful people. Unlike the Dilettante, however, they are bound by their inheritance or lineage to certain responsibilities, with the assumption that they might someday lead their families into the future…assuming nothing goes wrong.

There are a number of jobs that fit within this occupation, including investigative reporters, photojournalists, private investigators, police detectives, criminologists, criminal prosecutors, espionage agents, and others who use their skills to gather evidence and analyze clues.

Military covers any training designed for organized martial defense or offense. Under this heading fall the standard categories, such as Seals, Rangers, and Special Forces, as well as naval, marine and air/space force personnel.

“Outcast” is not so much an occupation as a forced way of life. Persecuted and exiled for being different, outcasts are lone pariahs or shunned members of a culture whose customs or characteristics society finds deviant or abhorrent. Outcasts lurk on the fringes of civilization. Some strive for acceptance, while others are trapped by their own feelings of resentment, self-loathing, or helplessness.

Scavengers turn society’s wreckage and discarded trash into useful tools or items for trade, and if they’re lucky, their endeavors might even yield one or two objects of special value. They effortlessly navigate and strip clean the most treacherous places, and their playgrounds are abandoned space stations, gutted buildings, and smoking battlefields.

Skilled drivers and pilots, transporters move people, information and precious cargo from one destination to another. They treat their vehicles as extensions of their bodies and are most comfortable behind the wheels of skycabs or the thruster controls of cargo shuttles.